MIRANDA SPEAKS OF A BRAVE NEW WORLD

‘And he turned to me quite cooly and said “No!” He flatly denied it. So I replied, “Oh, okay. That’s weird, though, because I just had a warning saying that this computer was running an unauthorised messenger application.”

Darryl shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t unduly surprised by the engineer’s reply, because security systems are sensitive devices and, by his own admission, he was running various scanning tools, which look like hacking devices to his own anti-malware software. In any event, Darryl figured, even if the engineer was running the program, he was probably just chatting to his mates in company time. Now at least he would realise that it was the wrong thing to do and that, if he did use it again, Darryl would be watching. So he just forgot about it.

Two weeks later, however, the same thing happened. This time, Darryl decided, he would wake the mighty VNC beast. Diving into the engineer’s computer, he started to search for the communications program – which he quickly identified as Miranda Instant Messaging. Many people now use instant messaging, which enables them to talk in real time to friends by sending a few words or sentences in little text boxes. In most cases Windows Instant Messenger (IM) can only talk to someone else who has the same software. Miranda’s advantage lies in the fact that you can communicate with a variety of different IM programs. It is especially beloved of some obsessional computer users.

Before unleashing the VNC, Darryl checked the engineer’s hard drive to see if he could spot anything peculiar, but the search proved fruitless. It was about 12.15, lunchtime. Just the time, Darryl thought, to run a little VNC session on his machine to ascertain once and for all whether this unauthorised program really was running on the engineer’s computer.

Miranda IM was as nothing compared to what Darryl saw when the VNC began to explore the secrets of the employee’s computer. The engineer had opened ten text documents at the same time and was scrolling through them at unnatural speed. Darryl was open-mouthed. Never had he come across anyone able to work with documents so quickly. All he could see as he watched the engineer’s screen was a blur of numbers, symbols and words. Slowly he realised that the engineer was copying parts of the document and then pasting them into a separate wordpad file.